I've been playing in a game that's been having a lot of secret doors lately, and have been thinking about some different ways of doing secret doors besides just making a roll to see or not see them. Here's my first idea, which was designed with D&D in mind but could perhaps be adapted to other fantasy RPGs:

This door comes in the form of a mirror. On the edges of the mirror is engraved:

"Though it appears magic, on closer inspection,
there is no magic at all in this mirror's reflection".

Using Detect Magic on the mirror reveals that it has strong auras of illusion and conjuration on it. The mirror's reflection appears to be perfectly normal, except in one respect: magic does not exist within the world of the reflection. If you cast a spell in the presence of the mirror, the effects of that spell are not reflected in it, although your reflections will make exactly the same actions you do in casting it, and will try and mimic the effects as best as possible.

Ex: If you use Cure Light Wounds on somebody, your reflection will still touch that character and go through the usual magic routines, but the reflection of the person it was used on will not have their wounds cured. If you create a Wall of Stone and lean on it, your reflection will pantomime leaning on a wall as best as it can. If you are levitating a small amount off the ground, your reflection stands on its tiptoes. Creatures which are completely magic, such as fire elementals, are not reflected in the mirror at all.

To get though the mirror, you must make some change in the room the mirror is in - such as pulling a particular lever - and have it not be replicated in the mirror. When this occurs, the mirror glass shimmers and transforms into a portal into a secret room. However, as soon as you work any magic that your reflections cannot mimic even vaguely, such as levitating over a wide pit, they stop reflecting your actions at all and turn all their efforts to keep the lever or whatever it is in the same position in the mirror as in the real world.

In one variant of this, the reflections might even walk out of the mirror to try and kill you when this happens. If so, they have the same abilities and equipment you do, except they lack all magical abilities and spells, and all their equipment is mundane. They are complete reflections of you down to the molecular level and so have a 25% chance of ignoring the effects of any given toxin, due to sterochemical effects. The same applies to any toxins they try to use on you. One hour after they exit the mirror, all reflections and reflected items dissolve into sand.

I'd like to hear your comments on this idea, or your own ideas for secret doors.

Yitzi

2012-11-04, 10:42 PM

Interesting idea, but how would they know that they're supposed to move the mirror in one but not the other?

As for secret doors in general, I had an interesting idea: Have a secret door that's essentially impossible to find (my idea was have it be behind some bookshelves in a library, and the shelves are too heavy to move unless cleared off first, which is prohibitive to do for every shelf), but there's some way to see the room that they lead into, and the door is visible on that side, so you can find the location of the door by drawing a careful map.

EtherianBlade

2012-11-05, 01:01 AM

I've been playing in a game that's been having a lot of secret doors lately, and have been thinking about some different ways of doing secret doors besides just making a roll to see or not see them. Here's my first idea, which was designed with D&D in mind but could perhaps be adapted to other fantasy RPGs:

This door comes in the form of a mirror. On the edges of the mirror is engraved:

"Though it appears magic, on closer inspection,
there is no magic at all in this mirror's reflection".

Using Detect Magic on the mirror reveals that it has strong auras of illusion and conjuration on it. The mirror's reflection appears to be perfectly normal, except in one respect: magic does not exist within the world of the reflection. If you cast a spell in the presence of the mirror, the effects of that spell are not reflected in it, although your reflections will make exactly the same actions you do in casting it, and will try and mimic the effects as best as possible.

Ex: If you use Cure Light Wounds on somebody, your reflection will still touch that character and go through the usual magic routines, but the reflection of the person it was used on will not have their wounds cured. If you create a Wall of Stone and lean on it, your reflection will pantomime leaning on a wall as best as it can. If you are levitating a small amount off the ground, your reflection stands on its tiptoes. Creatures which are completely magic, such as fire elementals, are not reflected in the mirror at all.

To get though the mirror, you must make some change in the room the mirror is in - such as pulling a particular lever - and have it not be replicated in the mirror. When this occurs, the mirror glass shimmers and transforms into a portal into a secret room. However, as soon as you work any magic that your reflections cannot mimic even vaguely, such as levitating over a wide pit, they stop reflecting your actions at all and turn all their efforts to keep the lever or whatever it is in the same position in the mirror as in the real world.

In one variant of this, the reflections might even walk out of the mirror to try and kill you when this happens. If so, they have the same abilities and equipment you do, except they lack all magical abilities and spells, and all their equipment is mundane. They are complete reflections of you down to the molecular level and so have a 25% chance of ignoring the effects of any given toxin, due to sterochemical effects. The same applies to any toxins they try to use on you. One hour after they exit the mirror, all reflections and reflected items dissolve into sand.

I'd like to hear your comments on this idea, or your own ideas for secret doors.

I could see working in a more arcane method for dealing with the mirror, such as casting a spell while holding up your own mirror. Say a wizard casts dispel magic in between the two mirrors as they are reflecting one another. The presence of the second mirror activates the ability of magic to affect the world in the first mirror, and the spell is broken.

Eurus

2012-11-05, 01:29 AM

That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure if the PCs would guess that there's a door to be looking for in the first place.